When Eurocrats become the baddies in thrillers, it's all over for Brussels

Thrillers can tell you a great deal about the preoccupations of a society. Their plots don't have to be entirely believable, but their milieus do. For the trick to come off, the baddies ought to reflect readers' anxieties. Once they were Soviet agents, then wicked multinationals, then Islamist bombers. Now they are Eurocrats.

In the main newspaper, Charles Moore reviewsAlan Judd's new novel, Uncommon Enemy, whose villain is a Euro-fanatic former spy who wears a loden coat (invariably a denominator of unsound opinions when worn by an Englishman, Charles perspicaciously notes). I, meanwhile, have been reading A Sentimental Traitor by Michael Dobbs. Without wanting to spoil the story, it turns on the readiness of Euro-integrationists to traduce the reputation, wreck the livelihood and threaten the life of a British MP who jeopardises one of their projects.

Dobbs is an old pro: he senses that there is a lively anti-Brussels market nowadays. And he knows that his essential premise is believable. We have observed the end-justifies-the-means mentality of the Brussels apparat over and over again. We remember how the slush-funds and malfeasances of Helmut Kohl, François Mitterand and Giulio Andreotti were defended as a small price to pay for the Maastricht Treaty. We hear the same wretched argument trotted out every year when the EU budget fails its audit. We have seen referendum results swatted aside when they go the 'wrong' way. The project evidently matters more than freedom, democracy or the rule of law.

Would Eurocrats really set out to destroy someone who had got in their way? Ask Hans-Martin Tillack, the German journalist arrrested for investigating fraud in the EU budget. Or Marta Andreasen, the accountant sacked for exposing shortcomings in the book-keeping. Or Bernard Connolly, the official fired for writing a book critical of the euro.

Authoritarian regimes typically assault dissidents sideways, accusing them of some unrelated offence. If you were an anti-Communist activist in Czechoslovakia or East Germany, you wouln't be put on trial for sedition, but for bribery or spying or child abuse. Your driving licence would be mysteriously revoked, your children denied university places. Nothing would ever be said, but everyone would understand what was going on.

The EU is not a tyranny, of course. It doesn't confiscate our passports or throw us into gulags. Yet it plainly sees its interests as being more important than any considerations of justice, fairness of impartiality. Let me put it like this: most Eurosceptic MEPs act in the constant expectation of having bogus accusations thrown at them.

Which is why A Sentimental Traitor works. Few of us expect to be shot at by a KGB agent or garrotted by a ninja. But most of us can imagine having our lives ruined by some EU agency. When the public demands such novels, it's over for Brussels: publishing is a commercial, not a political, proposition. Speaking of which, buy the book. You'll enjoy it.